2009/10 to 2017/18

Charlton Athletic never reached the Premier League in the nine seasons from 2009/10 to 2017/18, spending four in the Championship and five lower down. Their best finish was 9th in the Championship, in 2012/13. They didn’t win a major trophy. Over those nine summers they paid £5.9m in transfer fees and took in £9.8m, a net profit of £3.9m.

Charlton Athletic came up as League One champions in 2011/12 and made a decent fist of it: ninth in 2012/13 with 65 points. From there it went the other way. Eighteenth, then 13th, then 22nd and relegation in 2015/16 with just 40 points.

The academy kept producing. Joe Gomez left for Liverpool for £3.5m in 2015, and the following summer Nick Pope and Jóhann Berg Guðmundsson both joined Burnley. Imagine those three in the same side for a few more years. The money coming in was modest: Igor Vetokele from Copenhagen, for around £2.4m, was as big as it got.

Charlton were a Premier League club as recently as 2006/07, so the 115.football brief is a return rather than a first visit. Start in League One in 2009 with £900m, keep the Gomez generation together, and The Valley should be hosting top-flight football again well before 2017/18.